Affliction Warlock Gear Recommendations

This section of the Affliction Warlock guide covers everything about gear, including: stat priorities, gear trinkets, and legendary item rankings. This guide is written by Terryn, I stream a lot on twitch. You can also check out my youtube page where I frequently post guides, ramblings, and boss kills. If you have any questions, it's best to PM me on discord @Terryn#6182. Updated for 7.2.5.

Trying to gear

When trying to gear, there are a few spot checks to tell if a piece of gear is probably an upgrade. If you are unsure, always simulate the changes in simulationcraft to be sure. There is no way to know otherwise, even with stat weights.

Does it have mastery

Does it NOT have versatility

Is it an item level upgrade

These 3 steps can decide just about everything except jewelry. Jewelry and trinkets are best left to simcraft because things can be kind of messy with those.

Set Bonuses

- Helps massively with shard generation, specifically since we’re now down our old friend Soul Effigy for consistent shard generation. This adds a bit more RNG into our rotation since these shards aren’t on a ramping RNG chance, but a flat RPPM.

- Adds a haste proc when UA is spent. Nifty but not something that changes our actual rotation.

Tomb of Sargeras Gear

TOS Gearing comes in two flavors. With Kapuze der ewigen Verachtung and without. While the helm is super strong on paper, the tier 20 helm is also the best itemized piece of the bunch, making swapping it for the helm a pretty terrible stat increase. This is one of the main reasons why the helm, while good, is not nearly as “Relatively strong” as it could be / was in tier 19.

This will use your current stat weights to give you a rough idea as to which items to aim for. Keep in mind your stat weights will shift as you approach it.

Secondly, my gear recommendations are based off of the “basic” rules listed above, while getting the most ideal 4piece available. These have also been verified through hours of simcraft tinkering and thousands of profiles. These profiles do not use any legendaries outside of the helm because it will effect your gear choices

Legendaries

General Warlock Legendaries:A small note about affliction legendaries. As you can see from the chart below, legendaries for affliction are extremely close in rank, to the point that it’s not so much a matter of which orange text that you get, but that you just get orange texted items.

Legendary Ranking:SIMS

The other Legendaries don't have any value in terms of damage. Prydaz, Xavarics Magnum Opus has a lot of uses as a stat stick and survivability, Sephuz' Geheimnis is incredibly strong in mythic+, and others have various other benefits.

Increases the duration of Seelen ernten from your Gepeinigte Seelen from 5 to 6.5 seconds. This increases what you can do with minimal souls and increases the max duration from 60 seconds to 78 seconds.

Rotation-wise nothing changes for you. If you stun a target you gain some movement speed. Infernal stun WILL proc this on bosses, as well as doomguard interrupts and imp dispels, everything else that can proc it will only proc it on trash.

This doesn’t change anything about your single target because its a dps downgrade to try and cast UA on multiple targets instead of just doing Drain Cycles as normal. If you are in a writhe build, this, like Lethtendris' Machtkordel will put SOME focus on putting UA on multiple targets, but it is not a mandatory thing and not a terribly high dps increase.

Best mobility legendary in the game. After you stop moving for 8 seconds, your next movement will not stop your casting for 5 seconds. Really strong on fights where you do regular re-positioning then standing still like Guldan, Helya, etc.

If you have this legendary you want to make sure that you can burst after using your Doomguard. That means that you want to have all your cooldowns. If you are running Grimoire der Überlegenheit you will ether have to hard cast Verdammniswache beschwören or if you're running Infernal, it will cast the infernal stun if he is out. NOTE THIS IS ONLY LOOTABLE AS DEMO

Nothing changes for you. There’s some pretty silly things you can do with soloing mythic things, and this lets you do even more of this. Theres some point to using it on a fight where you need to slow adds. This does NOT increase the value of Absolute Verderbnis.

Its handy for things if there's enough in your raid to instantly nuke down one target, but otherwise it's not nearly as useful in the hands of an affliction lock. There are just other trinkets that provide more overall damage.

None.

Trinkets

Trinkets are another hot-button topic, and because of their strange interaction with Dots, some are drastically better for Affliction than for other specs, while others are drastically worse for Affliction than other specs. Super strong trinkets are Flüstern im Dunkel from NH, especially if you can get a 920+ titanforge dream, and Angelaufenes Schildwachenmedaillon

Finding Gear on Wowhead

From simple recommendations to advanced filters, Wowhead can help you find the gear you want.

Item Finder

The Item Finder is a great way to search for gear if you are new to Wowhead's filtering system.

Choose what item category, gear slot, and class specialization you're interested in, and it will return results for you. You can further narrow it down by source--including gear from LFR and heroic dungeons.

Character Planner

The Character Planner returns personalized gear suggestions for you and shows which content has the most upgrades.

Simply load up the planner with you preferred character and it will list gear recommendations in a 20 ilvl range for you. It will also list how many gear upgrades each boss has so you can plan out bonus rolls. Finally, the character planner will perform an audit and let you know if you have any missing enchants, glyphs, or gems.

If you have a character in our Profiler which is great for tracking vanity collections and viewing your character in our 3D modelviewer, you can click on the "Planner" button in the header to access the tool. If you don't, you can just enter your information in at Tools > Character Planner.

Item Filters

Wowhead utilizes a powerful system of item filters to narrow down the gear you need.

On http://www.wowhead.com/items, you can enter in some basic options at the top--the name of the item, its item level, the level the players needs to be. The "Usable by" dropdowns cover factions, class, and role.

The dropdown menu right above "Stat Weights" opens to display a variety of advanced options. These cover the following:

General item info such as Added in Expansion/Patch, BoE/BoP, Unique-Equipped, Class-Specific.

Source: All in-game sources, ranging from raid difficulties to the Black Market Auction House to sold by a vendor.

Miscellaneous: Many of these filters are not relevant to equippable gear such as Crafting Reagents and Toys, but you can filter for items that are currently obtainable.

Once you've selected a filter from the menu, click on Apply filter for search results. You can repeat the process to filter for multiple criteria at once--for example, Agility gear that is found in Mythic Foundry.

Over on the right-hand side of the page, you can select a particular Gear Slot or Quality to narrow results even further.

Finally, you can quickly view a subset of items at once using the Database Menus. Head to Database > Items and mouse over the Weapon and Armor options for quick links to gear arranged by armor type and slot.Back to Top